If you’re looking at your seed packets, either itching to get them in the ground or started indoors, or being all smug because you did that last weekend, just take a moment to give thanks for seed banks.

Susan Dworkin's "The Viking in the Wheat Field"

No, I mean seriously. Even if all you’re planting this year are trusty hybrids (and I understand that; I plant some myself). Even if you think your penchant for heirloom veggies is a bit of a folly, just a gardener’s indulgence. If you eat wheat in any form, you may someday be more dependent on the work of seed banks than you care to think about right now.

Why? Plant geneticists are racing against a variety of wheat disease called UG99. They’re trying to breed in resistance to this strain of stem rust before the disease circles the globe in the way of all nasty things we’d like to keep confined within tidy little borders. They hope that the resistance they seek is stored — guess where — in the genetic vaults of seed banks.

Check it out in the book “The Viking in the Wheat Field,” a biography of Bent Skovmand, by Susan Dworkin, and the transcript of an interview with her. By the way, Skovmand was adamantly opposed to the patenting of genes in plant material, calling it akin to patenting every word in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Susan Clotfelter has always played in the dirt, but got dragged into gardening as an obsession when she reclaimed her hell corner: a weed-infested patch of clay inhabited by one tough, lonely lilac and a thicket of weeds. Along with training as a Colorado State University Extension Master Gardener volunteer, she dug deeper with beds of herbs and lettuce at her home and rows of vegetables wherever she could borrow land. She writes for The Denver Post and other publications and appears on community radio.

Julie's passion for gardening began in spring of 2000 when she bought a fixer-upper in Denver's Park Hill neighborhood, and realized that the landsape was in desperate need of some TLC. During the drought of 2003, she decided to give up on bluegrass and xeriscape her front yard. She wrote about the journey in the Rocky Mountain News, in a series called Mud, Sweat & Tears: A Xeriscape story. Julie is an avid veggie gardener as well as a seasoned water gardener.